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Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre member and Australian Privacy Foundation Board member Dr Monique Mann organised a large public lecture on the topic of Human Rights in Queensland and Beyond. Professor George Williams AO, Dean and Anthony Mason Professor of Law at the University of NSW, joined the QUT Faculty of Law to deliver a keynote lecture examining a range of issues relating to human rights in Australia and internationally.

This event was co-hosted with a range of community, legal and government partners including: Human Rights Act for Queensland Campaign, Australian Privacy Foundation, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Queensland Council for Civil Liberties and Office of the Information Commissioner Queensland.

Professor Williams discussed the current state of human rights (or lack thereof) in Australia, the process and challenges associated with the development, implementation and enforcement of human rights charters, and most importantly, how a Queensland Human Rights Act would affect Queenslanders and Australians more broadly.

Following the lecture, a diverse panel of experts reflected on the importance of a Human Rights Act in their specific domain. The panellists included:

The event and discussion around this topic is particularly relevant following the Palaszczuk Government’s election commitment in early 2018 to introduce a Human Rights Act in Queensland. It is anticipated that the Palaszczuk Government will release a draft of the Queensland Human Rights Act in the near future.

The lecture attracted over 150 community, government and academic representatives. Philip Green, QLD Privacy Commissioner and panelist, found the discussion highly rewarding and shared his experience of the event: “I believe the discussion will be of tremendous benefit as Queensland embarks on public debate of a draft bill and as Australia debates some very concerning legislative

Southern Criminology By Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Máximo Sozzo and Reece Walters, just published! (Routledge, London and New York)

Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. It is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice.

This book turns the origin stories of criminology upsidedown. It traces criminology’s orientalist fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism. It uncovers the colonial legacy of criminal justice, best exemplified by the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples. It analyses the ways in which discourses about punishment have simply assumed that forms of penality roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world. It advances the case that although the major drivers of eco-crime and global warming come from the Global North, their most harmful impacts are felt in the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes distinctive patterns of violence in the Global South.

Reviews

“A thought provoking book! Written by the leaders of Southern Criminology, it is a most important contribution that addresses the issue of North-South imbalance in the production of criminological knowledge. The book powerfully challenges the assumed universality of dominant criminology theories and explains how contemporary criminology knowledge has been highly limited by Western experiences.”

– Professor Jianhong Liu, Department of Sociology, University of Macau

“Southern Criminology takes the reader on a journey of critical imagination to offer a future landscape for the discipline of criminology. This journey is challenging and profound. The authors chart a route from the discipline’s past to the promise of a dawn for its future that anyone willing to travel with them will find intellectually valuable and hugely rewarding. Take a risk. Take this journey. You will not be disappointed.”

– Professor Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, University of Liverpool and Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology

“For most of its existence, criminology has been moulded by the intellectual perspectives and ideological reflexes of the global North—a region that contains only a fraction of the world’s population and only a fraction of its experience of violence and social harm. Southern Criminology promises to be a foundational document in a growing movement to bring the rest of the world into the centre of criminological dialogue and action.”

– Professor Elliott Currie, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California Irvine

“This book is an inspiring project of retrieval of wisdom bubbling up from marginality and domination in global structures of social relations. The ideas retrieved bridge global divides rather than essentialize ‘North’ or ‘South’. Dialogue across diverse divides helps build new intercultural and interscalar understandings in a pathbreaking volume.”

– Professor John Braithwaite, RegNet, ANU

“This book presents a convincing argument about the need to develop a Southern Criminology to overcome the monopolization of criminology by the Northern part of the world. It leaves us well informed on important issues, especially on the richness and pertinence of incorporating Southern perspectives into the Global understanding of crime and violence. Far from trying to discredit the knowledge produced by Northern Criminology, this book proves a simple fact: that we can learn from each other, and that knowledge can travel from Global South to North, South to South, East to West and vice versa.”

Fulbright Specialist Mark Wynn is a leading police trainer who has lectured at universities and police academies throughout the world. He draws upon his extensive experience in law enforcement and his knowledge of family violence; stalking; domestic violence and sexual violence. He has also worked a consultant and an advisor to government departments, providing strategies to prevent domestic violence and support in the development of policy and training curriculum for law enforcement.

Interested in undertaking higher degree research for a PhD or Masters with the School of Justice at QUT? It’s not too late to get an application in before the scholarship round ends on 30 September 2018.

We are currently looking to supervise students in our areas of expertise:

On Tuesday the 18th of September Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre member Dr Monique Mann spoke at the CSIRO Data61Live conference. Data61Live is Australia’s premier science and technology event. More than 2,000 people registered to attend the event from corporates, SMEs and start-ups, universities, government and schools. Dr Mann spoke about some of the different ways forward (i.e. law, regulation, policy, design) for making the most out of big data while protecting privacy and preserving trust in new technologies.

What is the moral of the human trafficking story, and how can the narrative be shaped and evolved? Stories of human trafficking are prolific in the public domain, proving immensely powerful in guiding our understandings of trafficking, and offering something tangible on which to base policy and action. Yet these stories also misrepresent the problem, establishing a dominant narrative that stifles other stories and fails to capture the complexity of human trafficking.

This book deconstructs the human trafficking narrative in public discourse, examining the victims, villains, and heroes of trafficking stories. Sex slaves, exploited workers, mobsters, pimps and johns, consumers, governments, and anti-trafficking activists are all characters in the story, serving to illustrate who is to blame for the problem of trafficking, and how that problem might be solved. Erin O’Brien argues that a constrained narrative of ideal victims, foreign villains, and western heroes dominates the discourse, underpinned by cultural assumptions about gender and ethnicity, and wider narratives of border security, consumerism, and western exceptionalism.

Drawing on depictions of trafficking in entertainment and news media, awareness campaigns, and government reports in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, this book will be of interest to criminologists, political scientists, sociologists, and those engaged with human rights activism and the politics of international justice.

Domestic Violence Beyond the Obvious: Interpreting Power, Control and Manipulation

Fulbright Specialist Mark Wynn

Please join the QUT School of Justice for a special domestic violence event with Fulbright specialist Mark Wynn. This interactive training will enable participants to see domestic violence offender manipulation through the eyes of people who have experienced domestic violence, first responders, and advocates. This session will enhance participants’ understanding of the power, control, and manipulation tactics used by abusers, touching on probable cause, interpretation of injuries, justifiable self-defense and determining the dominant/primary aggressor.

Professor Kerry Carrington has just returned from Argentina where she is researching women’s police stations (Comisarias de Mujer) with Partner Investigator – Professor Máximo Sozzo Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina. The field research has involved interviewing officers who work at these special women’s police stations (WPS). The research team includes – Natacha Guala Research Assistant, Maria Victoria Puyol HDR student, Professor Diego Zysman a Senior Research Associate from the Faculty of Law, Universidad de Buenos Aries. The research has been funded by an ARC Discovery Grant and will report is outcomes in both Spanish and English.

Women’s only police stations emerged historically at a time of re-democratisation in Latin America. They were designed to enhance women’s confidence in the criminal justice system, encourage reporting, prevent re-victimization, and send a message to the community that gendered violence was no longer tolerated and men who abuse women will be made accountable. Brazil was the first country in Latin America to establish women’s only police stations in 1985. Since then, women’s police stations have been established in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Uruguay, and more recently in Sierra Leone, India, Ghana, India, Kosovo, Liberia, the Philippines, South Africa and Uganda. A 2011 United Nations Women evaluation found that women only police stations in Latin America enhanced women’s access to justice and their willingness to report, increased the likelihood of conviction, and enlarged access to a range of other services such as counselling, health, legal, financial and social support. Of those surveyed for the evaluation, 77% in Brazil, 77% in Nicaragua, 64% in Ecuador and 57% in Peru felt that women only police stations had reduced violence against women in their countries (Jubb et al 2010).

A recent study of WPS in Brazil used female homicides as a proxy measure for assessing their effectiveness. They compared 2074 municipalities from 2004 to 2009 and found that ‘women’s police stations appear to be highly effective among young women living in metropolitan areas’ . The homicide rate dropped by 17 per cent for all women, but for women aged 15-24 in metropolitan areas the reduction was 50 per cent (or 5.57 deaths reduction per 100,000) (Perova and Reynolds 2017: 193-194).

The province of Buenos Aries currently has 138 women’s police stations employing around 2300 officers. The first one was established at La Plata in 1988. They are designed to address, respond and prevent gendered violence. WPS are hybrid agencies, partly funded by provincial, local barrio, government and community organisations. In Buenos Aires, WPS are commonly located in brightly painted houses that provide a holistic range of services including child care, transport, counselling, legal, social support and comfort. They do not remotely resemble police stations as commonly conceived. Social workers, lawyers and health professionals work in an integrated response team with officers from the WPS to assist victims of gendered violence. The stations have a mandate to prevent gendered violence through grass roots community level primary interventions, local activism, forging partnerships, running local campaigns, and producing informative material for public dissemination. Their effectiveness in preventing gendered violence and the identification of what elements might transfer to other countries has never been studied.